.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘[Freud was] able to recognise the whole in the part, the rapture of sleep in the contentment, the whole silky richness of the body in the one conjunction of shoulder, neck and chin’ (Lawrence Gowing)
Held in the same private collection for over half a century, Sleeping Head (1961-1971) is a portrait from a pivotal moment in Lucian Freud’s practice. The sitter rests on the leather sofa in the artist’s Delamere Terrace studio. Closely cropped, enlarged in scale and viewed from below, her face is an expanse of broad, sweeping strokes that are rich in colour, light and movement. Lawrence Gowing pronounced the work ‘an unforgettable picture … It is rounded most delicately, lovingly; the portrayal takes part in the dream’ (L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London 1982, pp. 150-151). The painting exemplifies the newly dynamic brushwork of Freud’s early-1960s period, and heralds the full-length nudes that would emerge later in the decade.
Sleeping Head was first seen in Freud’s second solo exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, London, in 1963 and has been prominently exhibited since, appearing in the artist’s major British mid-career retrospective of 1974, as well as in surveys at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (1988), and in Rome, Milan and Liverpool (1991-1992). Most notably it was part of the retrospective Lucian Freud: Paintings, which travelled from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. to the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, the Hayward Gallery, London, and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin from 1987 to 1988. This exhibition led to newfound international acclaim for Freud. Robert Hughes declared him ‘the greatest living realist painter’: John Russell went further, saying rather that he was ‘the only living realist painter, and the one who has given back to realism an element of risk and revelation that had long been forfeited’ (J. Russell, ‘A Painter’s Searing Insights Into the Soul’, The New York Times, 27 September 1987, section 2, p. 37).
Freud saw Sleeping Head as a crucial painting. He met the unnamed sitter at a Soho bar after returning from a holiday in Greece, where he had experimented with watercolours during a break from oil paint. Working unusually swiftly, he completed the work over six or seven sittings in Delamere Terrace. The assurance of the artist’s hand is palpable. It was, he recalled, ‘One of the few I did very fast: I couldn’t work now if I hadn’t worked in that way’ (L. Freud quoted in W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame, 1968-2011, London 2020, p. 50). The process unlocked a new confidence in his approach, allowing him to express the push and pull between muscle, skin and bone through bolder and more forceful brushwork. Relinquishing the sharply defined detail that had characterised much of the previous decade’s work, the early 1960s would see him depict bodies and faces with long, active brushstrokes that carried their own kinetic energy.
From the early Sleeping Nude (1950) to the monumental, richly textured late work Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995), Freud frequently portrayed people at rest. He was known to keep his studios warm for his subjects’ comfort, creating a closed and serene space for long, uninterrupted sittings. While his relationship with the subject of Sleeping Head was relatively brief, her position bespeaks a total ease in his presence. With its smooth shadows, the warm light on cheekbone and jaw and the sweep of golden hair, Freud’s painting amounted, for Gowing, to an ‘image of somnolent rapture’ (L. Gowing, ibid., p. 151). In its intimacy and compassion it recalls antecedents such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Le Lit (1892), as well as Pablo Picasso’s lyrical vision of a dreaming Marie-Thérèse Walter in Le Rêve (1932).
Nudes, or to use Freud’s preferred term ‘naked portraits’, would soon become a major preoccupation. ‘I was going to do a nude,’ he told Gowing of Sleeping Head, ‘then I realised that I could do it from the head.’ In the soft, swelling brushstrokes that define his view of the sitter—the contours of the face, a shoulder, perhaps part of a hand—he sought to imply the unseen forms of the rest of the body. In a rare instance of his revising a completed work, Freud revisited the painting around a decade later to fine-tune the area below her chin. ‘This condensation of a nude’, explains Gowing, ‘was the beginning of a two-way traffic in awareness; the nudes of the next ten years, perhaps Freud’s masterpieces, were expansions of the portrait’ (L. Gowing, ibid., p. 151). The exquisite head-and-shoulders nude Pregnant Girl, depicting his lover Bernardine Coverley, was also completed in 1961. He would begin his first full-length naked portrait, Nude – Portrait III, the following year.
The decisive momentum of Freud’s early-1960s work has been much admired by critics. ‘The entire paint surface—swelling cheek or glowing forehead against the undulations of the button-back leather sofa—consists of exhilarating broad brushstrokes colliding, or swerving and halting to avoid colliding’, wrote Nicholas Penny when Sleeping Head was shown in the Hayward Gallery (N. Penny, ‘Lucian Freud’, London Review of Books, vol. 10, no. 7, 31 March 1988, p. 13). For Robert Hughes, these paintings revealed a fascination with the deft, eternally modern-looking brushwork of Frans Hals, and also related to Francis Bacon’s figural distortions. Bacon had once described true painting as ‘a complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa’ (F. Bacon, ‘Matthew Smith – A Painter’s Tribute’, in Matthew Smith: Paintings from 1909-1953, exh. cat. Tate, London 1953, p. 12). Freud would take this idea into still more visceral territory. ‘As far as I’m concerned the paint is the person’, he later said. ‘I want it to work for me just as flesh does’ (L. Freud quoted in L. Gowing, ibid., p. 191). In the compelling, elastic vigour of works such as Sleeping Head, his transformative process becomes especially visible.
Held in the same private collection for over half a century, Sleeping Head (1961-1971) is a portrait from a pivotal moment in Lucian Freud’s practice. The sitter rests on the leather sofa in the artist’s Delamere Terrace studio. Closely cropped, enlarged in scale and viewed from below, her face is an expanse of broad, sweeping strokes that are rich in colour, light and movement. Lawrence Gowing pronounced the work ‘an unforgettable picture … It is rounded most delicately, lovingly; the portrayal takes part in the dream’ (L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London 1982, pp. 150-151). The painting exemplifies the newly dynamic brushwork of Freud’s early-1960s period, and heralds the full-length nudes that would emerge later in the decade.
Sleeping Head was first seen in Freud’s second solo exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, London, in 1963 and has been prominently exhibited since, appearing in the artist’s major British mid-career retrospective of 1974, as well as in surveys at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (1988), and in Rome, Milan and Liverpool (1991-1992). Most notably it was part of the retrospective Lucian Freud: Paintings, which travelled from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. to the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, the Hayward Gallery, London, and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin from 1987 to 1988. This exhibition led to newfound international acclaim for Freud. Robert Hughes declared him ‘the greatest living realist painter’: John Russell went further, saying rather that he was ‘the only living realist painter, and the one who has given back to realism an element of risk and revelation that had long been forfeited’ (J. Russell, ‘A Painter’s Searing Insights Into the Soul’, The New York Times, 27 September 1987, section 2, p. 37).
Freud saw Sleeping Head as a crucial painting. He met the unnamed sitter at a Soho bar after returning from a holiday in Greece, where he had experimented with watercolours during a break from oil paint. Working unusually swiftly, he completed the work over six or seven sittings in Delamere Terrace. The assurance of the artist’s hand is palpable. It was, he recalled, ‘One of the few I did very fast: I couldn’t work now if I hadn’t worked in that way’ (L. Freud quoted in W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame, 1968-2011, London 2020, p. 50). The process unlocked a new confidence in his approach, allowing him to express the push and pull between muscle, skin and bone through bolder and more forceful brushwork. Relinquishing the sharply defined detail that had characterised much of the previous decade’s work, the early 1960s would see him depict bodies and faces with long, active brushstrokes that carried their own kinetic energy.
From the early Sleeping Nude (1950) to the monumental, richly textured late work Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995), Freud frequently portrayed people at rest. He was known to keep his studios warm for his subjects’ comfort, creating a closed and serene space for long, uninterrupted sittings. While his relationship with the subject of Sleeping Head was relatively brief, her position bespeaks a total ease in his presence. With its smooth shadows, the warm light on cheekbone and jaw and the sweep of golden hair, Freud’s painting amounted, for Gowing, to an ‘image of somnolent rapture’ (L. Gowing, ibid., p. 151). In its intimacy and compassion it recalls antecedents such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Le Lit (1892), as well as Pablo Picasso’s lyrical vision of a dreaming Marie-Thérèse Walter in Le Rêve (1932).
Nudes, or to use Freud’s preferred term ‘naked portraits’, would soon become a major preoccupation. ‘I was going to do a nude,’ he told Gowing of Sleeping Head, ‘then I realised that I could do it from the head.’ In the soft, swelling brushstrokes that define his view of the sitter—the contours of the face, a shoulder, perhaps part of a hand—he sought to imply the unseen forms of the rest of the body. In a rare instance of his revising a completed work, Freud revisited the painting around a decade later to fine-tune the area below her chin. ‘This condensation of a nude’, explains Gowing, ‘was the beginning of a two-way traffic in awareness; the nudes of the next ten years, perhaps Freud’s masterpieces, were expansions of the portrait’ (L. Gowing, ibid., p. 151). The exquisite head-and-shoulders nude Pregnant Girl, depicting his lover Bernardine Coverley, was also completed in 1961. He would begin his first full-length naked portrait, Nude – Portrait III, the following year.
The decisive momentum of Freud’s early-1960s work has been much admired by critics. ‘The entire paint surface—swelling cheek or glowing forehead against the undulations of the button-back leather sofa—consists of exhilarating broad brushstrokes colliding, or swerving and halting to avoid colliding’, wrote Nicholas Penny when Sleeping Head was shown in the Hayward Gallery (N. Penny, ‘Lucian Freud’, London Review of Books, vol. 10, no. 7, 31 March 1988, p. 13). For Robert Hughes, these paintings revealed a fascination with the deft, eternally modern-looking brushwork of Frans Hals, and also related to Francis Bacon’s figural distortions. Bacon had once described true painting as ‘a complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa’ (F. Bacon, ‘Matthew Smith – A Painter’s Tribute’, in Matthew Smith: Paintings from 1909-1953, exh. cat. Tate, London 1953, p. 12). Freud would take this idea into still more visceral territory. ‘As far as I’m concerned the paint is the person’, he later said. ‘I want it to work for me just as flesh does’ (L. Freud quoted in L. Gowing, ibid., p. 191). In the compelling, elastic vigour of works such as Sleeping Head, his transformative process becomes especially visible.